Famous Last Words based on Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

Many people are interested in the last words of a person who is dying. I believe it was W.C. Fields who said “I’d rather be in Philadelphia!” and the French satirist and philosopher Voltaire, when a priest urged him to renounce Satan, supposedly replied, “This is no time to make new enemies”. One friend fondly remembers the passing of a beloved pastor who, just before he died, sat up in his bed, a look of amazement and wonder on his face, and said “I didn’t know it would be so beautiful!”



Our passage this morning is not a death-bed utterance, but it has that quality of finality, of urgency, the intensity of the speaker who desperately wants his or her listeners to get the message. Forget all the rest, but don’t forget this. This is what I need for you to remember. This is important.



The gospel of Matthew tells us Jesus’ final words, before his ascension into heaven were, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” The gospel of John reports Jesus’ final words to his disciples when he appears to them by the sea of Galilee. He tells Peter, “If you love me, feed my sheep” and “follow me”. Paul’s likely last greeting, written to the young Christians in Philippi, is a word of joy and thanksgiving and a brief prayer of benediction, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”



The author of Hebrews writes, “Keep on loving each other as brothers and sisters.” Somehow these final words, for me, are connected with each other and establish the distinctive mark of a Christian. A promise of the abiding presence of Christ in us. An exhortation that we follow or stay close to Jesus. These are our final “orders” if you will, and in doing them, we will nourish all those we meet. The author of Hebrews sums it all up with the single word, “love”.



We are used to talking about love. It is the banner word of our society. Well, maybe I should say, in the 60's it was the motto of the hour. Remember the old slogan, “Make love, not war?” It sounded nice. For those of us who still had fresh memories of the Second World War and were living under the threat of a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb, we longed for some better truth than a frantic search for wealth. Love was the key. I still enjoy the romantic ditty we used to sing. Remember it? “Nature Boy”, and we couldn’t hear it often enough. I would not be surprised to hear it still being sung today. Its lyrics tells it all:



There was a boy,

a very strange enchanted boy,

they say he wandered very far,

very far, over land and sea.

A little child, and sad of eye

but very wise was he.



And then one day

one happy day he passed my way

and as we talked of many things

fools and kings,

this he said to me,

“the greatest thing, you’ll ever learn

is just to love,

and be loved in return.”



Come down to more modern times and you’ll hear Andrew Lloyd Webber assure us “Love changes everything” and we were eager to believe it. Or, as my daughter reminds me, perhaps the more plaintiff lyrics of Don Henley in his song - Heart of the Matter, which speak just as poignantly about the centrality of the need for love:



These times are so uncertain

There's a yearning undefined

And people filled with rage

We all need a little tenderness

How can love survive in such a graceless age?

The trust and self assurance that lead to happiness

Are the very things we kill, I guess

Pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms

And the work I put between us doesn't keep me warm





Time passes, fashion changes, old truths become yesterday’s cliches, and while we haven’t exactly “given up” on love, we’ve learned there’s more to it than mere words. As a minister, who is called upon to perform marriages, and later to offer counseling for the disillusioned pair who can no longer do the hard work of love, I am saddened by how often the word is shunned, or discounted. It is as if, once people get close to one another, they discover closeness requires intimacy, a stripping away of our protective masks, and risks exposure, disgust, humiliation. The poet may believe it is “better to have loved, and lost, than never to have loved at all.” Today’s generation seems more inclined to get its love vicariously through movies and TV where it looks nice in others but is too hard for us. Odd, isn’t it, that we should continue to praise the ideal of love while personally denying its possibility at all.



Keep on loving one another, the author of Hebrews says. Of course, we shrug. Easy for you to say. You knew Jesus. It was all still real for you. It’s a different world now. Aside from the fact it’s quite unlikely that the author did know Jesus, is our world so different? Oh, I know we are much more sophisticated - although I wonder if we are as intellectually astute as were the Greeks. We are more mobile. Although, I read recently Americans are moving less now than they did in the 18th and 19th centuries, or even the first half of the 20th. Alright, but we have better technology, we have - as the slogan goes - better living through chemistry. Of course, with our chemistry we also have pollution. Our technology may have tied us closer together through our Twitterings and our Facebooks, but the downside to that is how impersonal we have become. Deprive us of our cell phones and our laptop computers and we are at a loss knowing how to interact with another human being.



As for the age of the Romans and the early Christians, while they had none of these advantages and disadvantages, yet they had to cope with persecution from the Roman Empire AND from their own Jewish families. They were outcasts from both. Their’s was a time that demanded conformity just as ours does, and when they sought to follow the teachings of a Jewish rabbi who had been executed in the most cruel and indecent way, they weren’t simply misunderstood, or thought of as lunatics, they were seen as dangerous rebels, enemies of the state, disrupters of the status quo who threatened the political establishment by creating unrest. The religious community of the Jews were equally aghast at this stark heresy that threatened the very foundation of Judaism. The new Christians must have found the commandment to love one another as difficult to live and do then as we find it today.



Love requires connectedness. Love recognizes both our isolation as unique human beings and our reliance on relationships in order to be complete. Americans historically have prized the rugged individualist. A Davy Crockett or a Daniel Boone is a true American hero, and the Robber Barons like Carnegie, or Gould or Vanderbilt or Rockefeller were our icons of success. Horatio Alger set the pattern for us and we rejoice when we see someone scale the heights from obscure poverty to fame and fortune. What we don’t see is how none of these heroes were finally truly independent. They all relied on help from someone or some group who gave them the vision, the courage, the strength they needed to succeed.



We are incomplete as isolated individuals. We need one another. Our vary ability to speak is dependent upon interaction with other human beings. Our ability to discern values comes from that same interaction. The myth of a Tarzan or a Mowgli, raised with animals in the wilderness, is just that, a myth. The command that we love one another is just as important for our own well-being as it is for those around us. Those who cannot love are to be pitied most deeply, for they are robbed an essential requirement of being human.



When Paul was summing up his anthem of praise to the concept of love, in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, he says quite simply, “when all else fails, love still stands”. It is love, more than anything else, that provides the pattern for what we call the “image of God”. Our ability to love, to interact with others, to relate to others at the deeper levels of our beings, is what not only makes us fully human, but what makes us most nearly like God. We show our kinship to God when we love one another.



So it strikes me as vitally important, essential, that we be continually reminded of the centrality of love as the essence of our humanity. If we would be truly human and truly alive, we must truly love. Such a love is not a bit of romantic fluff, it is the essence of our beings.



Keep on loving each other, it’s the only thing that really matters. Do that, and you will know God, and in knowing God, you will finally know yourself. Amen.